Yeah there was a time in the 1970s if you had a Japanese car in a major urban area you could expect it to get vandalized. There was also that Micheal Crichton novel Rising Sun, and a bunch of Tom Clancy novels are about how a conspiracy of evil Japanese businessmen are gonna take over the world.

It was a weird moment where Japan was the designated enemy for a while. It really goes to show how easily propagandized the average American is, deciding who their enemies are based on whichever economic desire our capitalists have. Japan eventually lost this fight though, the Plaza accords and the Liberal Party trying to cut taxes ended up in the 1990s recession, which they never quite recovered from. Now Japan has a much less hostile and dominant role in their trade with the west

People here are probably too young to remember, but by the late 1980s Nikkei 225 index had risen by more than 900% over 15 years, outperforming Nasdaq and S&P and every other market by miles.

Japan’s invasion of Hollywood, with Sony acquiring Columbia Pictures. Mitsubishi bought the Rockefeller Center. Japanese investors were buying up US properties left and right. For your ordinary Americans, it had looked like Japan would own America by the end of the century.

Japan already overtook US in worldwide semiconductor sales in the mid-1980s, with rumors of Fairchild, IBM and even Intel itself being acquired by Japanese firms. An internal Intel memo predicting that “Silicon Valley might become a wasteland” as it laid off 30% of its workers.

Then… it all came crashing down by Christmas day of 1989. The extraordinary growth of Japanese economy had been fueled by cheap credit, leading to asset price bubble that eventually bursted. Japan never recovered from that.

The US would also go on the experience a similar fate: with the financial deregulation of the Clinton era (started during Reagan) pumping out cheap credit that fueled the 1990s growth, everyone thought they would get richer simply by endlessly borrowing from the banks and going all in into real estate. This ultimately precipitated in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, and the global financial crisis of 2009. In many ways the US still hasn’t recovered from that crash.

He types from the electronic device that's on his person 24/7

Plastic surgery? It's just having silicone implanted rather than silicon.

Impossible Burger was 80% plastic by mass

as long as the macros are good i'll keep eating that garbage

Even if it was 80% plastic, the advertising would still be positive advertising, trying to spin it as still a good thing.

Compared to Cyberpunk 2077 where their artificial slop is basically advertised as being the most disgusting slop ever, but people still accept that anyway

I didn't remember anything about widespread nuclear war. The Arasaka-Militech Corporate war ended with both sides getting nationalized, not widespread nuclear devastation. The USSR still exists (though subsumed by Sov Oi), as does China (as evidenced by Kang Tao and you do a quest for someone implied to be a Chinese spy). Theres also lots of references to Europe being a haven for advanced Biotech (especially in the expansion) and there's advertising for holiday packages in Somalia.

There's only one mission I remember where you engage with any sort of revolutionary rhetoric. It's the one where you're tracking down hidden messages calling for an overthrow of capitalism. Johnny's there commenting, and despite how he's supposed to be this militant revolutionary himself, he completely mocks the hidden messages. He goads you to find the rest and where they're coming from, I think he says they're probably written by some dumb angsty kid. I thought it seemed really out of tone, but now I realize the game's writers completely missed the point of the setting.

Then again I'm losing faith in cyberpunk as a genre to begin with. William Gibson turned out to be the biggest liberal on Earth. Mike Pondsmith doesn't seem much better.

I’ve never played it because I’m not sure if my computer could handle it, but also even though I’m not super knowledgeable about cyberpunk I think an entire world of it that you’re thrust into would be a little much. Outside of that though I’m still surprised how much content of any kind people consume but don’t really think about. I know art for arts sake is still valid, but I’ve always tried to look for meaning in any piece of art I’m experiencing and it’s just wild to me that other people not only don’t do that, but are almost proud that they don’t? Idk it’s just very foreign to me anytime I see it.

Wait Metal Gear Solid, the games that feature themes such as: the cold war, war economy, the military industrial complex, espionage, coups, PMCs etc. Are political? I thought it was just about cool stealth man getting hot babes and killing guys.